PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - An hour after arriving Saturday in this earthquake-ravaged island capital, a crew of medical personnel volunteering with Naples-based Hope for Haiti got right to work treating the worst of the injured Haitians.

Dozens of injured awaited the Southwest Florida medical crew when it arrived about 2 p.m. at General Hospital at the State University in Port-au-Prince.

The first patient treated by retired pediatrician Dr. Steven Shukan, of Naples, was a 2-year-old boy with cuts covering his body, his torso wrapped in bandages.

The boy's pupils were blank and after a few chest compressions, Shukan determined the boy had been dead for several hours. He couldn't break the tragic news to the family members surrounding the boy, however, because he doesn't speak Creole.

Shukan was one of three doctors and four nurses dispatched to Port-au-Prince by the Naples-based Hope for Haiti. The group was cleared to land in the Haitian capital around 1 p.m. Saturday. An hour later they were knee-deep in patients.

The grisly triage scene they were brought into crossed into three main rooms filled with dazed patients and their family members, with a fourth room being mopped up. Groans and pleas for help in Creole echoed through the corridors,

In the room next to where Shukan worked, Dr. Philip Organ, a wound care specialist for Physicians Regional hospitals, and Vinouth Pierre, a critical care nurse for NCH Healthcare System, were treating seven-months pregnant Dominique Jina.

Jina spent days trapped under a boulder in a mountain suburb. Her daughter was killed in Tuesday's earthquake.

The boulder that pinned her pulled all the muscle and tendons off her ankle. Infection had begun to take over the gaping wound, exposing her ankle bone.

"She will probably lose her foot when the wound closes and gangrene sets in," Organ said as he scrambled to retrieve his supplies from a nearby store room.

The doctor and nurse cleaned Jina's gaping wound, started an intravenous line, and left her with her husband in the room alone to go to the next room full of patients.

The four rooms of the wing of the hospital labeled "Ortho" for bone breaks and fractures is serving as a staging ground for the operating rooms established in the next wing.

The crew from Hope for Haiti was able to relieve another set of missionary doctors and surgeons to set up shop next door.

On the opposite side of the Ortho triage area was the morgue. It is continually cleaned out as bodies are shipped to a mass grave on the outskirts of the city.

Hope for Haiti's country director Mike Stewart, 28, found himself appointed to organize doctors and surgeons from several groups and local hospitals into a functioning emergency hospital.

With his team from Hope for Haiti at his command, he was able to switch the duties of the other doctors to create four operating rooms in a wing next door. He hopes to have 11 working operating rooms by Sunday.

"The biggest issue we have right now is the compound fractures because we need to clean them up or amputate or set the bone," Stewart said.

"There is going to be a lot of death because of infection,'' he said. "What we are looking at now is a second wave of what the earthquake has done."

As daylight faded late Saturday on the hospital without electricity, a generator chugged to life nearby, supplying a single line of power to the new operating rooms.

Stewart gave the orders to pack up and the seven medical volunteers from Hope for Haiti climbed into SUVs and headed for security and shelter at the Villa Creole hotel for the night.

As they headed off into the darkness of Port-au-Prince, screams of pain could be heard from the new operating rooms they left behind.

As Hope for Haiti organizes additional shipments of supplies and medical volunteers back in Naples, this crew of seven was off to rest and prepare for the morning, when they will do what they can with what they have here in Haiti.